This is a slice of my philosophical, lay scientific, musical, religious skepticism, and poetic musings. (All poems are my own.)
The science and philosophy side meet in my study of cognitive philosophy; Dan Dennett was the first serious influence on me, but I've moved beyond him.
The poems are somewhat related, as many are on philosophical or psychological themes. That includes existentialism and questions of selfhood, death, and more. Nature and other poems will also show up here on occasion.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Pianist Van Cliburn performs for a packed house in the Great Hall of the
Moscow Coservatory in April 1958 during
the first International
Tchaikovsky Competition. Associated Press file photo via Dallas Morning News

Van Cliburn's talent alone might have earned him a place among the
20th-century giants of his instrument, alongside classical pianists like
Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz. But after a magical Moscow
spring in 1958, Mr. Cliburn's fame eclipsed even those musical
contemporaries, rivaling that of another young superstar of his time,
Elvis Presley.

Mr. Cliburn was "The Texan Who Conquered Russia," according to a Time
magazine cover. At the height of the Cold War, the lanky 23-year-old
from East Texas traveled to Moscow and won the first Tchaikovsky
International Competition, an event created to showcase Soviet cultural
superiority. Mr. Cliburn's unlikely triumph was thus said to bring a
thaw in tensions between the rival superpowers and created a mythic
parable about the power of art to unite mankind.

It
was an iconic moment. Not just in the Cold War, but in American
classical music, demonstrating that American home-grown talent in the
highly competitive world of the piano did exist.

At the time, America had produced an exceptional generation of pianists
besides Mr. Cliburn who were all in promising stages of their own
careers, among them Leon Fleisher, Byron Janis, Gary Graffman and Eugene
Istomin.

Like Rachmaninoff, one of the Russians
he played in Moscow, he could span 12 white notes with his hands,
allowing his technique, described like this:

He developed a commanding technique, cultivated an exceptionally warm
tone and manifested solid musical instincts. At its best, his playing
had a surging Romantic fervor, but leavened by an unsentimental
restraint that seemed peculiarly American.

That said, I also agree with this portion of the Times' assessment:

But if the Tchaikovsky competition represented Mr. Cliburn’s
breakthrough, it also turned out to be his undoing. Relying inordinately
on his keen musical instincts, he was not an especially probing artist,
and his growth was stalled by his early success. Audiences everywhere
wanted to hear him in his prizewinning pieces, the Tchaikovsky First
Concerto and the Rachmaninoff Third.

His subsequent explorations of wider repertory grew increasingly
insecure. During the 1960s he played less and less. By 1978 he had
retired from the concert stage; he returned in 1989, but performed
rarely. Ultimately, his promise and potential were never fulfilled.

Van
Cliburn himself said he felt like he "had been at this thing for 20
years already" by 1958, and that in part explains why he didn't develop
further.

It's a shame. Prokofiev and other moderns could have well stood the attention of a more mature Van Cliburn.

However,
he did, through starting the Van Cliburn Competition, give another gift
to American classical music -- its further development. For that alone,
we should all be very grateful.

Scott Cantrell at the
Dallas Morning News, an email acquaintance of mine from my days in
Dallas describes the start of that, as well as his life in Fort Worth:

He already had many friends in Fort Worth, where in 1962 the
quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was inaugurated
in his honor. He served as an artistic adviser to the competition, to be
held again in May and June 2013, and he took a keen interest in its
winners’ careers.

With the aura of an old-school Southern
gentleman, with a velvety baritone voice, Mr. Cliburn became Fort Worth
royalty. He was as warmly gracious to the youngest piano student as to
the city’s movers and shakers.

“He was a true,
true gentleman,” (Richard Rodzinski, former executive director of the
Van Cliburn Foundation) said, “genuinely modest, self effacing, always
surprised at
people remembering him, appreciating him. Generosity, modesty,
gentleness, incredibly loyalty as a friend, great, great kindness —
these were the attributes that made people so terribly fond [of] him.”

That said, Cantrell reflects what the Times said about his later career:

In 1989, Mr. Cliburn started to revive his concert career, and he
performed that September at the opening of Dallas’ Meyerson Symphony
Center. He again appeared with major orchestras and continued to draw
rapturous audiences, but the old magic appeared only intermittently. The
rich tone of his earlier years had hardened, his memory and technique
had become less reliable and his interpretations had become fussy,
mannered. A couple of onstage fainting spells made headlines.

“Something
died there,” Bryce Morrison, a British critic specializing in piano
performance, said in a 2004 interview. “I do think he was a victim of
his own success, a victim of a commercial thing that can make you and
destroy you at the same time. It wasn’t a very long career before things
started to crack.”

No matter. He continued to grace the Cliburn Competition with his presence, his self.

Here's a performance, from 1962, of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto that won him fame in Moscow in 1958:

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Not much new here for those of us already critically informed by things, but some tidbits.

Tabor shows how Paul took personal visions of Jesus, merged them with what must only be considered his conception of a Hellenistic mystery religion, used this to invent the Eucharist and his idea of Baptism, and got either his direct followers of the next generation, or those directly in his orbit, to write most of the Christian New Testament that's not directly attributed to Paul. In doing so, he gave James (Jacob), Jesus' brother, the back of his hand at best and possibly worse. And even more so with Peter, Tabor argues.

None of that is new to me, other than thinking more clearly about Paul creating a mystery religion. What was a bit newer is realizing just how much Paul transformed crudely corporeal Jewish ideas of a bodily resurrection into something creative, somewhat along the lines, perhaps, of middle Platonism, but without any school of Platonism's antithesis to matters bodily.

That said, the book has a couple of weak points. While it generally rejects the gospels for historical value, Tabor still accepts conventional datings of Jesus' birth and death. Alternate ideas, such as "Jesus" perhaps actually being the Pharisee leader crucified a century earlier by a Maccabean king, don't cross Tabor's mind.

And, Tabor is not one to psychologize Paul, namely on the "why" this persecutor became a zealot.

I'd say this book is a four-star for people with little familiarity of the actual development of the New Testament, but just three stars for those who know more.

(Sadly, Tabor is an Eisenmann/Baigent-crowd "Jesus dynasty" guy, per another book of his.) The third star is probably too much.)

Saturday, February 02, 2013

If you’re not familiar with that name, it appears to have
been something largely developed by Chris Stedman, now the recently published
author of a book by that name, which is what this blog post is all about.

First, some personal identification by me.

Regular readers of this blog, or at east the
part of it that deals with religion, philosophy and metaphysics, know that I
normally don’t have a lot of use for the New Atheist, or Gnu Atheist,
“movement.” I've written about my issues with Gnus on many occasions, most recently here. I consider them too confrontational, for one thing. I consider them
too … fundamentalist, to be wry, secondly. Third, unlike them, I have no desire
to “evangelize” the religious, let alone conduct an intellectual
browbeating quasi-jihad.

Well, that same angle is where Chris generally comes from.

That said, is Faithiest the book about branding
Faithiest the idea as well as telling Stedman’s own quite interesting journey,
which includes his gay sexuality and coming terms with that while spending part
of his time growing up in a conservative evangelical church?

Well,
two different reviews have two different
takes. Which I will get to in just a bit, because, first, I'm going to
give you my own answer, now that I've read the book myself.

Here's
a list of observations, going generally in order of the book, but also
somewhat, in the later ones, in order of imporance once I get to the
meet of the book. First, those observations on the book, then the rest
of my original post, followed by other, earlier updates at bottom.

1.
He doesn't use the phrase, but Chris clearly was an "old soul" as a
kid. I relate. He was also naive as a kid, at times, it seems. Maybe
even clueless. I also relate.However, he also doesn't always seem aware
of that in hindsight, which is a bit different, and relates to his
joining that church. On the other hand, maybe he is aware of today.
Maybe it's part of a persona. Yes, my thought is going more that way.

2.
The first time he visited, he talks about how felt "moved" by the
embrace from the "welcomer," and he later notes that was probably a
budding gay sexuality issue. However, he never explicitly says that that
was part of why he joined the church. Is this an ellipsis of
deliberateness of some sort? Or has it not occurred to Chris?

3.
He joined this church for community. Only later did social justice
drives arise. Since he had gotten his mom more interested in church
then, why didn't they go back to her family's Methodism? We're not given
any story here. Nor, if we want to find out more, are we given the name
of the presumably nondenominational conservative evangelical church.

4.
His dad gets almost no mention. Yes, his parents divorced, but it seems
Chris as at least 10 when that happened. What was, and is, their
relationship? Good, bad, nonexistent? Simon Davis, in one of the longer
reviews mentioned below, faults Chris for not telling how any of his
academic religious background influenced him, as far as naming
particular religious names, etc. I'll go further. I'll ding him for not
discussing in any way relations with is dad. Per other comment by Davis,
it makes the book more depersonalized. Sorry, Chris, and please, don't
even give the "Minnesota nice" excuse as to why you didn't talk about
him.

5.
Another family issue. If Chris had gotten his mom more involved at that
conservative evangelical church, how did she know to have him talk to
this particular liberal Lutheran minister immediately after she read his
journal? Did she already suspect he was gay? Chris gives us no
background.

6.
This too, reflects an odd "depersonalization" of the book. None of his
siblings are named. None of their reactions to his "journey" are related
to us. For that matter, neither is his mom's reaction. The more and
more I think about some of the "depersonalization" aspects of the book,
not just vis-a-vis his family but primarily there (see blogger Davis'
comments about Stedman seemingly so detached from his academic
influences), I wound up dropping my Goodreads review rating by a star.

7.
Was Chris really "that much" of an atheist in his early years after
"coming out"? Several things in teh book tell me now. He says that, at
the end of his undergrad time at Augsburg, he felt jealous of
progressive theologians, and he felt angry that he couldn't be and
believe the same. He went to a graduate divinity school. And, after
getting to Chicago, he only discovers "atheist community" after a full
year of active involvement with Interfaith Youth Core? (One great blog
review, below, picks up on that.)

Chris,
Minneapolis is a big and diverse enough place that, had you done some
simple Googling, you surely could have found something there.
Considering that "community" was the primary reason you joined that
conservative evangelical church, I find another disconnect here, to put
it a bit mildly. It sounds like "atheist community" was not that
important to you. And, related to that (and before any interaction with
folks like American Atheists) we have:

8. A comment like this, page 130, my emphasis at end:

Anyone who looked remotely religious ... was given a suspicious sideways glance by my nonreligious friends as they went outside for their continual cigarette breaks.

Sorry,
but I find that last clause gratuitous, and you're a good enough writer
I can't quite believe that just somehow got there. I wouldn't quite
call it snide, but it's gratuitous with baggage, let's say that.

9.
Per the branding angle, I'm wondering if Davis isn't right about Chris'
claim to be "fashionably underdressed" at the secularist event in
Chicago in chapter 1 of the book. I see that claim to be possibly
"branding" related, if it's not totally correct. As in, "Look at my, the
green around the ears kid." Other parts of that incident are ...
interesting, too. Chris never says why he took his shoes off when he
entered the apartment hosting the post-event soiree, and if others did
or not.

10.
Per the branding angle, in another way. It sounds like "atheist
community" was not that important to you, at least not until after
extensive involvement with Interfaith Youth Core; is there a
marketing/branding related issue? This is about the time that Eboo Patel
gets you on the Washington Post religion pages blogging, about the time
Greg Epstein of Harvard gets in touch with you, etc.

Some
of this may have been luck, fortuitous circumstances, etc. Some of it
may have been a conscious decision, as in "I need to investigate atheism
as community as part of my next steps and moves." But ... there's
little discussion of that. (Yet another illustration of how the book is
relatively "thin." Or, per the "story" issue below, of how the story
telling is selective.)

11.
Like Davis, below, Chris' use of the word "queer" is a bit interesting,
especially in light of his criticizing Gnu Atheists for, among other
things, being a bit too much in the faces of the religious. From what I
know of the LGBT world, perhaps not to the same degree, but I think
"queer" has a bit of that itself. It's interesting that he starts using
the word in his story (go near the bottom for more of the "story" angle)
just after accepting that he's gay, and disengaging from that
conservative church.12.
Finally, there's the matter of luck, and hard work/drivenness. Chris
merely hints at it, but, below his Minnesota Nice, there seems to be a
Type A personality scrambling to climb ladders. There is also a definite
bit of luck, like landing the position with Interfaith Youth Core, then
having the likes of a Greg Epstein contact him back, after his Type A
"push" started. This all ties in with the marketing/branding angle I see
in the book.

At
least one FB friend common to Chris and I probably won't like the
review. But, it is what it is. And, with a strong marketing push for the
book, and it getting a lot of attention in the atheist and skeptic
blogosphere, and me having seen some of that (like the reviews below),
it was going to get a close read from me. And, not just the book, but
the Faitheist brand, and the brander, were going to get that close look
too.

Beyond
critiquing the book as it interacts with branding, and a particular way
to do non-Gnu atheism, the "depersonalization" makes it not a very good
memoir coming from wherever, whomever, for whatever reasons. If it
didn't have the Faitheist angle, would it get any buzzplay at all?

Anyway,
to other reviews, detailed below the fold (and yeah, I may post just
book review comments separately, since this has become as much a review
of Chris Stedman as of his book):